Reluctant Seer

Cassandra Brooks, the narrator of Bradford Morrow’s new novel, “The Diviner’s Tale,” sees too much, thinks too much and feels too much. And in the telling of her strange tale she also, sadly, talks too much. She is a woman who is visited with unwanted visions, whether of the past or the future or some alternative present she often can’t tell. The novel begins with her account of the very first of what she calls her “forevisions”: when she was 7, she warned her older brother not to go out one summer night, and he was killed in a car crash. In the story’s present tense, she is in her mid-30s, living with her 11-year-old twin sons in the upstate New York town where she was raised, and occasionally turning her paranormal gifts to modest advantage by hiring herself out as a diviner; when asked, she’ll dowse for water in her neighbors’ fields. In the course of one of these expeditions, she sees something terrible — a young girl hanged from a tree. But when she brings the police back to the scene, the body has disappeared without a trace, as if she had simply dreamed it.

This is a nice setup for a spooky yarn, but Cassandra, understandably, doesn’t want to be in that sort of story, and she expends a good deal of time and verbiage trying to persuade herself that she isn’t. She keeps circling around the question of what it is she has seen, sometimes seeming to be playing tricks on herself, as a child would: looking at it sideways, or through her fingers, or looking away and then turning back again suddenly, to check if it’s still there. She drifts off into the past every now and then, to tell stories about her family history — she comes from a long line of diviners — and her childhood. It’s never quite clear, even to her, if she’s simply distracting herself or if she’s searching for clues. With diviners, it seems, the distinction between rapt attention and aimless wandering can be pretty fine.

That distinction can be tricky in some writers too, and Morrow appears to be one of them. “The Diviner’s Tale” is vividly imagined and carefully plotted, but it is also — sentence by sentence, page by page, chapter by slow chapter — oddly dilatory, digressive in ways that can’t always be justified by the heroine’s emotional confusion. Morrow’s style is elaborate, lush with metaphors and allusions: Cassandra has been supplied with a good classical education, a strong interest in mythology and a thoughtful temperament, so nothing she says, no matter how fancy or overwrought, sounds entirely out of character. But you still wish she, and Morrow, would get to the point a little quicker, and after a while the thick, leisurely style becomes just puzzling. And kind of annoying.

It makes sense that the heroine would feel the urge to deny that she’s in a horror story. What’s harder to figure out is why the writer who put her there should also want to deny it. “The Diviner’s Tale” is plotted like a genre novel, complete with inexplicable manifestations and hovering intimations of evil. There may even be a killer at large in the woods. And Cassandra is a recognizable and reliable genre type, the descendant of generations of reluctant, pained seers. (Her most famous recent ancestor is probably Johnny Smith, the tragic clairvoyant of Stephen King’s novel “The Dead Zone.”) Yet with all these patently thrillerish elements in play, Morrow chooses to tell his story in a style that deliberately, and perversely, attenuates the suspense. Why concoct a supernatural tale if you’re not going to come through with a thrill or two?

The answer, I’m sorry to say, may be that he fell in love with a metaphor that does him wrong. Morrow has clearly done his research on divining, and lovingly trots out precious bits of arcana from his collection, including a genuinely fascinating historical sketch about a 17th-century diviner named Martine de Berthereau. As the novel wears on, though, the heroine’s vocation becomes steadily less interesting because Morrow keeps burdening it with significance, until, in the end, the act of divination has been asked to represent practically every form of human cognitive activity.

Just before the book’s climax, Cassandra, sitting in her study one night, tries to summon her best wisdom about her peculiar calling as she looks at a map of Greece: “Naxos, Rhodes, Samothrace. Icaria, where Daedalus’ son was buried after flying too close to the sun and plunging into the sea — no more fortunate a child than Martine de Berthereau’s in Vincennes. All that the map finally stood for were stories upon stories upon stories. Paris and his golden apple, Helen of Troy. The oracle at Delphi whose shrine was inscribed with the most simple yet impossible advice ever offered, Know thyself. And yes, my story, too. All we had ever been were stories, and saying ourselves, unveiling our stories, was the best, the only, chance at divining ourselves.” And you thought it was just about holding a forked stick and looking for water.

Morrow isn’t inexperienced: he has written five previous novels and edits the very good literary journal Conjunctions (which he founded). And God knows he isn’t sloppy; his prose is, if anything, overfastidious. “The Diviner’s Tale” is an ambitious book, an attempt to explore the heart’s mysteries by means of stories and images and the rolling profusion of language — none of which finally seem quite adequate to the task. It’s an honorable failure, and maybe an instructive one. What the novel, with all its frantic wandering, illustrates is how difficult it is to find an expressive equilibrium between “literary” fiction and genre fiction, the still point at which their different aims and techniques somehow merge in a single, strong current of meaning.

In a horror story or a mystery novel, the flow is all toward narrative resolution, and is — or should be — swift and fierce. Literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way. That’s the sort of fiction Bradford Morrow has always written, and like his heroine he decides at last that he can’t turn his back on his particular, individual gift, even if it isn’t good for the book. Reading “The Diviner’s Tale” is an odd, disorienting experience because its matter and manner don’t match up: it’s like staring at a double-exposure photograph. Morrow obviously knows himself, and he’s written a novel that doesn’t know itself at all.

THE DIVINER’S TALE

By Bradford Morrow

311 pp. An Otto Penzler Book/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.

Terrence Rafferty is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

A version of this review appears in print on February 6, 2011, on page BR22 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Reluctant Seer. Today's Paper|Subscribe